Asylum Seekers

By Mike Peed

March 29, 2013

What does a political refugee notice when arriving in, say, Los Angeles? Is he shocked by the quotidian displays of flesh? Troubled by the angry jumble of a city he has known only in its varnished Saturday matinee form? Unbalanced by discordant echoes of home, like the Venice Beach busker whose turban appears native to the old country?

For Saladin Khourdi, the 17-year-old protagonist of Laleh Khadivi’s novel “The Walking,” it is the ever-present shadow thrown by a bullying sun: “He wishes for a cloudy day to relieve him of this constant dark stamp or some great shade that will erase the print of himself that follows and leads, follows and leads.” The ache for a life familiar; the fresh bruises of homelessness and hunger; the guilt from abandoning relatives; the inability to temper one’s otherness — this is Saladin’s shadow, the truths that steal refuge from the refugee, that trail like “a dim, dull friend.”

“The Walking” is Khadivi’s second novel in a planned trilogy about several generations of an Iranian family. The author was born in Esfahan in 1977, two years before the revolution that shoves Saladin, a Kurd from the western city of Kermanshah, to California. Khadivi has lived in Belgium, Puerto Rico, Canada and all over the United States, a peregrination that, she has said, connects her more to “Edward Said’s exilic consciousness than to any one particular country.” “The Walking” is a deliberate, nakedly passionate confrontation with her past.

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Laleh KhadiviCreditMeghan McNeer

Early in Khadivi’s story, Saladin and his older brother, Ali, are asked to prove their loyalty to the ayatollah by participating in an execution. When Ali impulsively turns a gun on the Revolutionary Guards (all with “faces like masks”), the siblings must answer a question: What is more courageous, to stay and fight for the integrity of your homeland or to dare to begin anew in a foreign place? (There is a third option, chosen by the boys’ father: to conform.) Ali, who is “like a new rifle loved and cared for and not yet fired,” wants to stay; Saladin fell long ago for American cinema and imagines himself living in “not the Texas of the cowboy movies or the glass canyons of New York, but Los Angeles, and eventually, of course, Hollywood.”

The novel’s narrative thrust may deal with Iranians, but Khadivi also seeks a borderless perspective. Intermittently, the storytelling draws back to address all the world’s “faulty pilgrims.” A chapter titled “How to Make a Home” advises: “If you have belongings, personal effects, unpack them, but do not put them away in drawers or cabinets or closets with any immediacy. Let them sit out for an hour, a few days, so they can greet you when you enter a room and you can catch sight of that sweater your grandmother knit and you can relax.” We are then told to “stand naked in as many rooms as you can.” For the asylum seeker, unmitigated freedom is not instinctual.

A successful novel needn’t set out to teach us something — to bend us morally — but the precision of Khadivi’s sentences, each with a gentle rhythm and a sure-footed intelligence, engenders deep sympathy for the miseries experienced by forced migrants. And yet for all the compassion Khadivi elicits, Saladin himself fails to show empathy. He cannot see that the argument of his brother, or even of his father, might have merit. He exploits the memory of his dead mother, who was equally enraptured by the movies, to justify his rickety life in America. He rejects a potential lover not because she is a fellow immigrant but because she is Middle Eastern, all he seeks to repudiate.

Befuddlement is his retribution: “These thoughts of time, its loss and gain, the knowing that the days before no longer belonged and the days to come were unknown and blank, confused Saladin to the point of panic.” Khadivi’s crystalline novel harbors no such disorder.

THE WALKING

By Laleh Khadivi

261 pp. Bloomsbury. $26.

Mike Peed is on the editorial staff of the Sunday Review section of The Times.